Unreasonable Reason

If you've read all of my posts on this blog (If anyone has, I'm really sorry you've subjected yourself to my ranting) you'll know that i have a minor issue with the enlightenment and how it's taken to be such a great thing in universities and in society as a whole. We've abandoned the earlier, primitive way of thinking and let our innate ability to reason and be rational take over. One problem. Turn your ears to the ideals and actions of dominant society and you'll hear the deathly shrieking of millions of lost and wasted lives and of millions more beating each other over the head with reckless abandoned. Reason and Rationality have failed miserably and if you don't grasp that concept or disagree with me.... well you'll have to keep reading.

I've been reading a book that touches on the developments of rationality and existentialism called "The Real Face of Atheism", i thought with all these semi coherent, self proclaimed philosophers running around with their eyes gouged out shouting about how they just read Christopher Hitchens delusional ramblings, i would try and read something a little more balanced to try and see where all this atheist rhetoric is coming from. And if you historicize the development of Western thought it's no surprise that books like "The God Delusion" gain best-selling recognition. On a side note if you read Hitchens in particular do some research before doing so, his politics are so incredibly twisted it would make any of his arguments hard to believe.

Rationality as a religion can be traced back as far back as Galileo, but i don't think the age of reason really took hold until Emanuel Kant, and then more firmly with Nietzsche. Kant basically wanted society to reason based on the pure rationality of the mind, free of God and free of happiness or emotion. One of the many problems with this is that the human mind, as has been demonstrated too many times to count, has not been able to sufficiently reason void of any emotions and void of any moral law. This is getting too philosophical and could go off into a discussion about moral law and how it's arrived at, should it/does it exist, etc. but i don't feel like writing about that right now.

One last thing that i think can safely put doubt into anyones mind as to the legitimacy and the prowess of the enlightenment, as it claims to have shaken off the chains of theologies sheer irrational stupidity. Most people know Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God but what most people don't know is the warnings he gave about such a problamation. If you read his parable of the Madman, the madman was who Nietzsche used to show the state of humanity once it had disposed of God, he was not in a healthy state of mind as his name would suggest. Further to all of this Nietzsche also predicted that the 20th century would be the bloodiest in history. He was right and it's a bit ironic that his writings were inspiration to lunacy driven madmen like Hitler and Stalin, who are responsible for 50 millions deaths between them. These men wanted to create societies with no moral law where the perfection and magnificence of their own minds would shape and nurture ideal conditions for the maximization of life. Hitler's mind is among the most twisted to have ever existed.

The point of all this is that while the enlightenment and its great philosophers claimed progression and assaulted the "primitive" ways of the past, the way of thinking they have created has shaped a world where death and destruction hang a dark cloud over the whole of humanity. The question more people need to start asking in universities and on the streets is: Why do we think they way we do and why are we taught what we are taught? And. Why isn't it working, why is the rotting core of humanities heart being further and further exposed? The more we see it, the more we wilt in the inescapable depression we brought on ourselves.

I could go on and on about this but i don't really have time to sit down for a few hours and actually construct a more viable argument, hopefully i made some valid point and avoided contradicting myself.